'A Room on the Garden Side': Hemingway's unpublished liberation of Paris - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1994 by Susan F. Beegel

and

Reach out your hand to Love's dark sister Hate, and walk with her across that hill we slowly walked, and see if Love is waiting at the top. Or who is waiting there instead. (Complete Poems 109)

4 For detailed accounts of the Hemingway/Malraux relationship, see John Garrick's "Two Bulls Locked in Fight: The Rivalry of Hemingway and Malraux in Spain" and Robert W. Lewis's "Hemingway, Malraux, and the Warrior-Writer."

5 If Malraux raised questions about literary celebrity for Hemingway, Hemingway raised similar questions for Malraux - "One runs a great danger when he tries to apply the 'star system' to intellectuals. And that is what Hemingway does for himself without a manager" (qtd. in Galante 189-90).

6 Because Hemingway made a number of trivial errors in transcribing Baudelaire's French, and Mary added others when she typed the story, I have copied the passage from Richard Howard's edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. Ideally, Hemingway's quotation of this passage should be checked against the "edition with the Gautier preface" he mentions in the story.

7 Again there is a strong connection between this story and Hemingway's 1944 second "Poem to Mary": "Love leaves easily without address. . . . Do you think there upon the hill, we'll find her there? No. She's long gone. . ." (Complete Poems 110).

8 Hemingway left the Ritz on 2 September 1944 in response to a Shakespearean taunt from Colonel Buck Lanham - "Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein. We have fought at Landrecies and you were not there" (Baker 420). Carlos Baker has described Hemingway's subsequent trip to rejoin Lanham as "the most foolhardy of his wartime adventures," because "the region he crossed was crawling with pockets of German troops and armor which had been by-passed in the swift Allied 'rat race' for the Belgian border" (Baker 420).

9 There is no simple explanation for this silence. For Hemingway, the war brought separation from his third wife, alcoholism, depression, adultery, grief over a son missing in action, the horror of Hurtgen Forest, and a court-martial for bearing arms as a war correspondent. Its aftermath brought recovery of the son, divorce, a fourth marriage, infatuation with a 19-year-old woman, and a 1,500-page struggle with artistic impotence, madness, and sexual despair in the ultimately abandoned Garden of Eden. The decade also saw displacement of the Lost Generation by a new generation of war-forged novelists - Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, John Hersey - young lions who must have seemed threatening to the aging Hemingway.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scibner's, 1969.

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. 1857. Trans. Richard Howard. Bilingual ed.. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.

Galante, Pierre. Malraux. Trans. Haakon M. Chevalier. New York: Cowles, 1971.

Garrick, John. "Two Bulls Locked in Fight: The Rivalry of Hemingway and Malraux in Spain." North Dakota Quarterly 60.2 (Spring 1992): 8-18.

Hemingway, Ernest. Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Scibner's, 1950.